Voting Patterns Research Articles

Demographic change and the 2016 presidential election

The election of Donald Trump raised many questions about the impact of immigration on American politics. This article asks whether backlash to demographic change in counties undergoing rapid growth in foreign-born, Hispanic, and/or Asian populations may have played a role in his election. I use techniques accounting for selection into treatment to examine the relationship between demographic changes at the county level and voting patterns in the 2016 presidential election. Analyzing individual-level survey data and controlling for voting patterns in 2012, I find that people living in counties with a rapid percentage point increase in the Hispanic population since 2000 were more likely to vote for Trump in the general and primary elections. For non-Hispanic Whites in the general election, Hispanic growth is predictive of Trump voting among those with lower levels of education and higher family incomes, as well as those living in counties with smaller Hispanic populations in 2000 ("new destinations"). There is also evidence of backlash to Hispanic growth among Asian voters. When analyzing county-level election results, I again find an uptick in Trump voting in high Hispanic growth counties for the general election, but these results do not replicate for the swing states, or for the primaries. This provides reason to be cautious about claims that backlash against local demographic trends “won” Trump the election, though data limitations prevent me from analyzing all key locations individually. Regardless, this study provides clear evidence of an impact of local demographic change on contemporary U.S. politics.

Buying Loyalty of Voters Or Local Elites? Political Alignment and Transfers to Provinces in Tutelary Regimes: The Case of Iran

The paper investigates the impact of an electoral support for president for short- and long-term transfers between national and provincial governments in tutelary regimes. The research uses the case of Iran; the database covers 330 observations for 30/31 provinces for 2005-2015. The results show that Iranian presidents target short-term transfers for disloyal provincial elites, while long-term transfers do not show political connection with voting patterns. The results also allow for assuming that the key factor for the logic of distribution is a political competition

Electoral Administration in Fledgling Democracies: Experimental Evidence from Kenya

We examine the effects of national voter registration policies on voting patterns with a large-scale experimental study. Together with Kenya’s electoral commission, we designed an experiment in which 1,674 communities were randomized to a status quo or treatment group, receiving civic education on voter registration, SMS reminders about registration opportunities, and/or local registration visits by election commission staff. We find little evidence that civic education improves registration. Local registration visits improve voter registration, a relationship that increases in poorer communities. Moreover, local registration increased electoral competition and vote preference diversity in down-ballot contests in the 2017 Kenyan elections. Our results suggest that status quo voter registration policies constrain political participation and competition, and that inexpensive policy changes may attenuate the effects of such constraints.

Voting behaviour in deeply divided societies: partisanship and ethnic voting in the hills of Manipur

ABSTRACT Voting patterns in the hills of Manipur show high ethnic voting indicating extremely partisan attachments. The salience of ethnicity in voting preference is reinforced by conflicts in the past. Periodic elections only exacerbated such divisions through partisan mobilisation and competition for representation along ethnic lines. Cross-ethnic voting is prevalent among groups wherein cousinage alliance cannot be forged due to past conflicts. The neck and neck competition for political representation among ethnic groups has sidelined the democratic rights of individuals over partisan group interests. In such deeply divided societies ensuring individual rights is the challenge of democratic governance, and the only viable solution to this pervasive problem appears to be a constitutional reform with the aim of having a more inclusive representation.

Assessing multi-level congruence in voting in comparative perspective: Introducing the municipal level

ABSTRACT This article widens the theoretical debate on congruence in voting by including the municipal level on top of the consolidated national-regional comparisons. The concept of multi-level congruence (MLC) is introduced and an original dataset is computed in order to investigate two distinct territorial-level comparisons in Italy and Spain: the national-municipal and the regional-municipal. By building on several strands of literature, the article tests different predictors of congruence. Our findings show that local elections are more likely to be impacted by national (and, to a smaller extent regional) politics in central, large municipalities; while local politics is more likely to prevail in peripheric, small municipalities. Moreover, municipal elections are second-order with respect to the national-level at least when election timing is taken into account. Furthermore, historical voting patterns also play a role in explaining the incongruence between local and national elections. Finally, national party-system reshuffle (slightly) affects congruence only for the regional-municipal comparison – and surprisingly not for the national-municipal one.

State Voting Patterns in the 2016 Presidential Election and Uninsured Rates in Non-elderly Adults.

Medicaid expansion and the health insurance “Marketplaces” of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) reduced the number of uninsured individuals to record lows in 2016.1 Uninsured rates may have since increased because of recent federal policies, including nullifying the individual mandate and reducing federal funding for Marketplace advertising and navigator programs.2 Even the expressed desires of congress and the President to repeal the ACA may have increased uninsured rates through a phenomenon known as “presidential cueing”3 by decreasing public support for the ACA, particularly in states with a plurality of Republican voters. State-level policies may have enhanced or attenuated the impact of these federal actions on uninsured rates, with specific policies generally varying based on whether states have a plurality of Republican or Democratic voters.2, 4 For example, some states have chosen to not expand Medicaid,2 and some states that initially expanded Medicaid have since applied for “Section 1115” waivers, which would allow for modifications to the Medicaid program such as the implementation of work requirements, that would effectively reduce enrollment.5 The degree to which states have devoted resources to Marketplace outreach and advertisement strategies to compensate for reduced federal funding also varies substantially along party lines.2, 4 Given the varying state responses to federal actions weakening the ACA, we conducted a descriptive study examining recent uninsured rates among adults aged 18–64, stratified by their states’ voting patterns in the 2016 presidential election.

Legislative voting and environmental policymaking in the American states

ABSTRACT In the United States (U.S.) wide differences exist in the environmental policies that individual states adopt. To better understand the reason for this variation I examine the conditions that shape the roll call voting behavior of state lawmakers on environmental policy proposals. I examine a variety of potential explanatory factors ranging from individual legislator characteristics (e.g., party, ideology and gender) and constituency-level conditions (e.g., citizen ideology, demographic characteristics and industry employment patterns) to indicators of campaign effort (business and pro-environment campaign contributions). Analyses of 22 states across four legislative sessions demonstrate support for many hypothesized effects. Similar to findings at the national level in the U.S. Congress, political party and ideology are identified as strong predictors of voting, but additional factors also have an influence. For example, the political leanings of district voters and activities of environmental interest groups have substantive effects on legislative voting patterns.

The Impact of Social Media Political Activists on Voting Patterns

This paper investigates how social media affects general voting patterns. Unlike previous studies investigating whether citizens’ use of social media affects political participation, this paper considers the connections that social media users have with political activists on social media, and how this connectedness influences general voting patterns, using data from Ghana. With contemporary theoretical perspectives and exploratory techniques, trends from past literature are presented, from a social media-based propagated survey with 420 valid responses. Structural equation modeling was used to test the conceptual model, which demonstrates that the connectedness with political and social media activists is significant and positively influences modifications in voting patterns. Online political participation and political affect also present an effect on voting patterns. The relationship between connections with social media political activists and online political participation is significant, as indicated by a strong covariance observed in the model. The results of the multigroup analysis also indicate some cultural and social issues to shape the phenomena for further investigation.

Presidential Elections, Divided Politics, and Happiness in the USA

We examine the effects of the 2016 and 2012 US presidential election outcomes on subjective wellbeing across party identification. We use Gallup data and a regression discontinuity approach, and focus primarily on evaluative (life satisfaction) and hedonic (positive and negative affect) indicators. We find that both elections had strong negative wellbeing effects on those who identified with the losing party, with little or no increase in wellbeing for those identifying with the winning party. The negative effects for the losing side were larger in 2016 than in 2012, by a factor of three on some indicators, and were driven mainly by women and middle‐income households. As such, both elections had a net negative wellbeing effect, but more so in 2016. Local voting patterns did not have a substantial wellbeing impact, nor did congressional elections taking place the same day. In 2016, the election also changed respondents’ perceptions about the economy, their financial status, and their community. After both elections, hedonic wellbeing gaps across parties typically dissipated within two weeks, but there was more persistence in evaluative wellbeing gaps, especially in expected life satisfaction. The latter gap persisted throughout 2017.

Ethno-religious voting in Nigeria: interrogating voting patterns in the 2019 presidential election

ABSTRACT This article analyses voting patterns in Nigeria’s 2019 presidential election. Its main objective is to gauge continuity or change in ethnic, regional and religious voting in Nigeria’s elections. The paper takes a historical approach in examining voting patterns in the past elections as a background to the examination of the 2019 presidential election. It was discovered that ethnic, regional and religious sentiments were still major factors that shaped voting choice in the election.

Calibration of Voting-Based Helpfulness Measurement for Online Reviews: An Iterative Bayesian Probability Approach

Voting mechanisms are widely adopted for evaluating the quality and credibility of user-generated content, such as online product reviews. For the reviews that do not receive sufficient votes, techniques and models are developed to automatically assess their helpfulness levels. Existing methods serving this purpose are mostly centered on feature analysis, ignoring the information conveyed in the frequencies and patterns of user votes. Consequently, the accuracy of helpfulness measurement is limited. Inspired by related findings from prediction theories and consumer behavior research, we propose a novel approach characterized by the technique of iterative Bayesian distribution estimation, aiming to more accurately measure the helpfulness levels of reviews used for training prediction models. Using synthetic data and a real-world data set involving 1.67 million reviews and 5.18 million votes from Amazon, a simulation experiment and a two-stage data experiment show that the proposed approach outperforms existing methods on accuracy measures. Moreover, an out-of-sample user study is conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk. The results further illustrate the predictive power of the new approach. Practically, the research contributes to e-commerce by providing an enhanced method for exploiting the value of user-generated content. Academically, we contribute to the design science literature with a novel approach that may be adapted to a wide range of research topics, such as recommender systems and social media analytics.

Cognitive Barriers to Reducing Income Inequality

As economic inequality grows, more people stand to benefit from wealth redistribution. Yet in many countries, increasing inequality has not produced growing support for redistribution, and people often appear to vote against their economic interest. Here we suggest that two cognitive tendencies contribute to these paradoxical voting patterns. First, people gauge their income through social comparison, and those comparisons are usually made to similar others. Second, people are insensitive to large numbers, which leads them to underestimate the gap between themselves and the very wealthy. These two tendencies can help explain why subjective income is normally distributed (therefore most people think they are middle class) and partly explain why many people who would benefit from redistribution oppose it. We support our model’s assumptions using survey data, a controlled experiment, and agent-based modeling. Our model sheds light on the cognitive barriers to reducing inequality.

POLA PENGUNDIAN DALAM PILIHAN RAYA UMUM KE-14 (PRU-14) 2018 MALAYSIA DI KAWASAN BANDAR DAN LUAR BANDAR

The results of the 2018 General Election in Malaysia show interesting and varied political dynamics based on issues, leadership, campaign strategies, winning and defeat factors, polling patterns, and also location. Hence the purpose of writing this article is to analyze the trend of polling in GE 2018 based on urban and rural areas according to 222 parliamentary constituencies in the country. The writing of this article is produced through the analysis of the GE13 2018 decision-making data for the Parliamentary constituencies as well as the in-depth analysis of secondary information from mainstream media and social media directly involved in the GE 2018. The findings show that almost all urban areas were won by Pakatan Harapan (PH) and some were won by PAS, in urban areas in the East Coast region of Peninsular Malaysia. The rural areas in the majority of Malays areas are dominated by UMNO/BN and PAS in Kelantan, Terengganu, and also rural parts of Kedah. There are also rural areas won by either BN, PAS, and PH with a slight majority because of the split of the three-party blocks. This is due to the different demographic segments of the voters either by local voters, young voters, outsiders, and even higher educated voters. Hence, the pattern of voting by geographical location in the GE 2018 is very interesting and compositing to be studied and deserves to be taken into account by the concerned parties, especially political parties, governments, and political researchers in order to be a solution to produce rational political thinking and to follow the current trends to care for the well-being of the common people.

Let’s party! The impact of local festivities on the incumbent’s electoral support

ABSTRACT Do local festivities affect an incumbent’s re-election prospects? Despite the relationship between local public policies and political behaviour is a central topic in political science, the effect of the organisation of leisure events on voting patterns has been largely neglected. Using data from Spain, we show that Mayors doubling the per capita amount of money devoted to local festivities during the last year of the legislature benefit by around two per cent points in upcoming elections. Two mechanisms account for this relationship. First, changes in the budget given over to festivities enhance the incumbent’s support when the spending on local festivities during the previous years of the mandate was generous. Second, local festivities bring about positive rewards when the financial situation of the municipality is stable. Overall, our article sheds light on the need to consider other domains beyond “core” public policies when assessing the dynamics behind an incumbent’s re-election.

Institutional Investors, Voting Power, and Voting Patterns: An Empirical Analysis

I investigate the role of voting power – the ability to influence a vote’s outcome – in the voting behavior of institutional shareholders. Using hand-collected data from Israel, an environment with concentrated ownership, I employ a power index borrowed from the political science literature to examine the voting power wielded by institutional shareholders and the voting patterns they display. I find that institutional shareholders’ voting power is negatively related to their tendency to vote against management: the stronger the shareholder, the higher the probability they will vote in favor of a management-sponsored proposal. Based on evidence obtained here, this behavior is attributable to pre-vote negotiations as well as to the voting strategy of “counting on my vote not counting.” Next, I use detailed data on shareholders’ votes to identify the channel through which a voting rule affects minority shareholder protection. I find that powerful institutional shareholders almost never use their voting power to vote against management, not even when signals of poor governance are discernible. I conclude that the effect of a voting rule on minority shareholder protection operates through proposal selection, rather than through direct voting.

Crossing the left-right party divide? Understanding the electoral success of the Czech Pirate Party in the 2017 parliamentary elections

In the 2017 Czech parliamentary election, the Czech Pirate Party (Pirates) gained 10.79% of the votes – an unprecedented success, compared to most of the pirate parties across Europe. However, as their electoral gain varies widely across the Czech Republic’s territory, this article analyses all (more than 6000) Czech municipalities in the elections of 2010, 2013, and 2017 to explain this variation. Overall, the success of the Pirates was driven especially by obtaining much more support in larger municipalities with younger populations (although not only those aged 18–24 but also older ones), lower unemployment, higher turnout, and lower support for leftist parties. Thus, from a spatial perspective, the patterns of Pirate voting largely resembled long-term spatial support for Czech rightist parties and we can conclude that the Pirates made considerable inroads to regions which had historically been strongholds of the Civic Democratic Party, as the former main party of the right, but also strongholds of minor right-wing (‘liberal centre’) parties of the 1990s and early 2000s. Success of the Pirates thus was based especially on votes from municipalities located in more developed areas, where the Pirates received many more votes than in structurally disadvantaged regions.

Monetary policy framework in India.

In 2016, the monetary policy framework moved towards flexible inflation targeting and a six member Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) was constituted for setting the policy rate. With this step towards modernization of the monetary policy process, India joined the set of countries that have adopted inflation targeting as their monetary policy framework. The Consumer Price Index (CPI combined) inflation target was set by the Government of India at 4% with ± 2% tolerance band for the period from August 5, 2016 to March 31, 2021. In this backdrop, the paper reviews the evolution of monetary policy frameworks in India since the mid-1980s. It also describes the monetary policy transmission process and its limitations in terms of lags and rigidities. It highlights the importance of unconventional monetary policy measures in supplementing conventional tools especially during the easing cycle. Further, it examines the voting pattern of the MPC in India and compares this with that of various developed and emerging economies. The synchronization of cuts in the policy rate by MPCs of various countries during the global slowdown in 2019 and the COVID-19 pandemic in the early 2020s is also analysed.

County-Level Differences in Support for Recreational Cannabis on the Ballot

Cannabis is traversing an extraordinary journey from an illicit substance to a legal one, due in part to an unprecedented wave of bottom-up law reform through successful citizen ballot initiatives. Yet, even in states that have legalized recreational cannabis, there is substantial geographic variability in support of cannabis legalization. Geographic variability in voter support for cannabis legalization is impactful (e.g., county moratoriums/bans) yet poorly understood. This paper demonstrates the consequences of county-level population demographics, sociopolitical factors, and community differences in experience with criminalization of cannabis possession for understanding county-level variation in support of recreational cannabis law reform on (un)successful ballot measures in California (2010), Colorado (2012), Washington (2012), and Oregon (2014). OLS regression analyses of nearly 200 counties indicate that differences in racial and ethnic composition (% Black, Hispanic), political affiliation (% Republican), past criminalization, gender composition, and higher education level of residents all predict county-level variation in support for liberalization of cannabis law. Stronger Republican political leanings and/or higher percentages of Black or Hispanic residents were associated with reduced support, whereas higher education, male sex composition, and greater past criminalization were associated with increased support for cannabis legalization across counties. Religiosity and rurality were inconsequential as predictors of county-level voting patterns favoring recreational cannabis. The substantial geographic variability in voter support for cannabis legalization has significant implications for policy implementation and effectiveness.

When cultural strength means political weakness: Romania’s marriage referendum and the paradox of conservative mobilisation

Abstract Held on 6–7 October 2018, the Romanian referendum on the topic of gay marriage was the fourth referendum of this kind organised in East Central Europe over a five-year period. Because turnout was low in all of them and demands explanation, this paper: i) discusses the common characteristics of these Eastern European marriage referendums, contextualising the Romanian referendum; ii) overviews the history of the Romanian referendum, emphasising the legal, political, ideological and societal aspects; iii) quantitatively examines the electoral geography of the voting patterns; and iv) interprets qualitative data seeking to understand the voters’ choices and why conservative mobilisation was so weak.

When parties go abroad: Explaining patterns of extraterritorial voting

As more countries grant political rights to their emigrants and more politicians look beyond national boundaries for support, scholars are beginning to explore the drivers and implications of voting from abroad. We use an original dataset of overseas campaigning by political parties in 108 elections in 24 countries to provide the first cross-national test of how party mobilization shapes turnout beyond national borders. Using fractional regression and inverse probability weighting with regression adjustment (IPWRA), we find that party mobilization increases extraterritorial voter turnout. Our results remain robust when controlling for emigrant profiles, institutional barriers to participation, and political context and correcting for self-selection bias.